It’s probably meaningful that you rarely find an example of, say, a woke electrician or plumber or truck driver. This is not an ideology that infects people at random. It’s clearly a class phenomenon.
- Malcom Kyeyune
One of the more disconcerting things in life for a Burkean conservative is finding oneself agreeing with a true and original Marxist thinker like the Swedish Malcom Kyeyune who has persistently called out white bourgeois educated classes for their faux liberalism and skin deep concern for the vast majority of the working class. According to Kyeyune, Wokeism has nothing to do with social justice or changing the world other than to entrench existing class privilege for the so-called ‘email caste’.
When I look around what I see going on it’s hard not to fault such a social observation, especially in the corporate world where I work. I know from my own experience that woke is used to distract attention away from what companies really get up to - they make profit at any cost which is the bottom line for any share holder - which is for society to not look too closely at the social price for that profit. Get a glowing rubber stamped rating from Stonewall’s own diversity champion scheme (a grift in itself) and colour in a rainbow flag in your corporate logo and you’ll be fine.
But I still tend to lean on the view of historians Tom Holland and David Starkey as well as British satirist Andrew Doyle that Woke has its origins in a perversion of Christian puritanism and has morphed into a deadly neo-religion.
If you fancy a Christmas gift to a family member or someone you know is woke, you can do him/her/they a service by gifting them a copy of Doyle’s fantastic new book: The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022). Doyle is a gay left winger and did his PhD in English at Oxford before he went into comedy (the writer behind Jonathan Pie).
Because he studied English he was exposed to the theories that underpin the woke and realised how intoxicating they were within the academic seminar rooms but made no sense when in first contact with reality outside the ivory towers. He became increasingly alarmed how woke ideas captured the traditional left.
The one minor criticism I would have is that Doyle’s book is so articulate, so on point, that perhaps it’s slightly bit too intellectual to reach any decent sized mass audience.
I think what we may sometimes forget is that the so-called intellectual elites - who went to a top tier university and were at the top of the food chain in their so-called ‘education’ - uncritically accepted the largely incomprehensible, self ejaculating intellectual French theorists whose work has essentially betrayed the intellect and strayed into the realm of the irrational. The effect of which has been, unfortunately, that people have taken it - and themselves - far too seriously.
But where else was there to go but to take the intellectual arena of the abstracted, nihilist western mind, except into the surreal, absurd and historically illiterate? The intellectual mind itself doesn’t go anywhere inherently meaningful, and these ‘secular’ New puritans clearly have the buttoned up arrogance and pseudo-morality of the old style religionists. But worse. They actually give the original Puritans a bad name. The original Puritans often get a bad press but they were terribly aware of their own human flaws and had no illusions how fallen we all were. This is why they emphasised grace and forgiveness at every turn. Good luck trying that with the New Puritans of woke.
